[MUD-Dev] Indies unite?

[Mike Rozak]

Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

> This is a hypothetical proposition and yes, it won't happen, but
> still...

> What if players could subscribe to all independent commercial MUDs
> for 20 bucks per month? I mean all, from MUD2 to Meridian59 (just
> to pick two well known examples).

Who gets the money? Is it divided up as a percentage of hours played
in each world? How does one verify that?

I'd expect the mirror of your suggestion to happen, where each large
VW developer (such as SOE, NCSoft, Mythic) provides a Neopolitan
version of their software... buy one box and get a fantasy VW, a
sci-fi VW, and an other-themed VW. Pay $20-$25 a month ($5 more than
usual) and have accounts on all three at once. (But only play one at
a time.)

My friends seem to have accounts with several MMORPGs at once, and I
could see families going for this too. A large VW developer will do
this if a) it decides the profits are in subscriptions and not in
box sales, b) the extra $5/month makes up for losses in sales, more
bandwidth, etc., and c) another large VW produces a similar retail
box and is successful.

By the way, the Neopolitan approach is one of the tricks Microsoft
used to make Microsoft Office a #1 seller. Microsoft Excel was a
very strong app and Microsoft Word slightly less so. PowerPoint and
the other applications included in Office were inferior to their
competitors at the time, but since they came as part of the bundle
they sold better and PowerPoint's competitors lost out.

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au
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